Cambridge International Examinations

Cambridge International Advanced Subsidiary Level

GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES 8987/11

Paper 1 Written paper May/June 2015
1 hour 30 minutes
RESOURCE BOOKLET
* 3 8 9 8 2 5 9 7 8 1 *

READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST

This Resource Booklet contains Documents 1 and 2 which you should use to answer the questions.

You should spend approximately 10 minutes reading the documents before attempting to answer the questions.
This is allowed for within the time set for the examination.

This document consists of 3 printed pages and 1 blank page.

DC (LEG) 106103
© UCLES 2015 [Turn over
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The documents below consider the United Nations. Read them both in order to answer all the questions
on the question paper.

Document 1: adapted from The United Nations’ Success Story by Jim Van de Water. Van de Water
was president of the San Diego (US) Chapter of the United Nations Association. This
article was written in 2005.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations (UN) at the end of World
War II. The entire planet had been scarred by the ravages of war, and millions of lives had been lost.
The survivors, led by the United States, pledged to end this scourge and created the UN to preserve
peace.

We believe that the UN has made a major contribution to world peace, although there have been
disappointments. The fact is that we did not have a third world war despite the titanic struggle between
the free world and the Communist bloc. The fact is that the number of state-to-state conflicts in the last
half of the 20th century was half that of the first half without the UN.

The process of creating world peace requires cooperative effort. The UN is a voluntary association
of member states – not a world government which can readily force cooperation. The 51 original
signatories to the UN Charter have grown to 191 members, each having its own economy, language
and culture. Given the number and diversity of states, the wonder is not that there have been problems
but rather that there has been so much success.

The problem is that we remember failures and discount success. We remember Rwanda and forget
successful operations in El Salvador, Mozambique and Namibia. We focus on Kosovo, and forget
Cyprus, where the UN has preserved the peace since 1964. Today, there are 18 peacekeeping missions
in the world with more requests for missions than the UN can handle. If UN peacekeeping has failed,
why does this demand exist?

It is important to remember the context in which the UN struggled for peace. Historians will look at the
last half of the 20th century as the period when the world largely ended more than 300 years of colonial
rule. Since the founding of the UN, 80 nations and more than 750 million people were freed from the
shackles of colonial oppression and exploitation.

These emerging nations also needed assistance to survive. The UN provided much of that assistance
through its specialized agencies and programs. Last year UNICEF* gathered more than $700 million in
supplies for children and operated safe water and sanitation programs in 90 countries. It provided much
of the leadership needed to bring aid to victims of the Asian tsunami.

The poor and disadvantaged, however, are not the only beneficiaries of UN action. The UN’s World
Health Organization is critical to the world’s “health security.” No sensible observer discounts the value
of its work in the fight to end polio; or deal with the AIDS crisis; or consider the work of the World Bank;
the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization to stabilize and improve the world
economy.

Could we do without any of these agencies, which are part of the UN family? Who would do the work
of UNESCO* to foster cooperative scientific and cultural programs? Who would provide the cooperative
framework for ensuring safe air travel if we did not have the UN’s Civil Aviation Agency?

We need the UN for all of these peacekeeping and humanitarian functions, and we need to be thoughtful
about our criticism of the UN.

*These are agencies of the UN responsible for carrying out specialist work.

© UCLES 2015 8987/11/RB/M/J/15

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Document 2: adapted from The Failure of a Noble Idea by David Ignatius, editor and columnist for the
Washington Post. This article was published in 2012 and considers the memoirs of the
United Nations’ secretary general, Kofi Annan.

Kofi Annan’s new memoir, “Interventions,” is a study in the failure of a noble idea, providing a devastating
account of some of the United Nations’ (UN) errors, especially the peacekeeping missions in the 1990s
in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia, which he collectively describes as the organization’s “greatest of
failures.”

There is no “big idea” easier to pay homage to in principle, or harder to make work in practice, than the
peacekeeping role of the UN.

The latest failure of the UN dream was its mediating mission to Syria. For months, it tried to cajole the
Syrian President into stopping the killing and starting a political transition that would avert civil war. To
which it received the standard answer to well-meaning UN missions: Go away. You are powerless to
stop me. The UN mediator, Kofi Annan, finally walked away last month, ending his Syrian mission.

I’ve long been a supporter of multilateral action through the UN, and I still think the United States is
most powerful when it operates under the legitimacy of international organizations. But the UN today
is bootless; the will of most members for a change of government in Syria, for example, is too easily
blocked by the veto of a single permanent Security Council member, such as Russia.

Somalia was a project of Annan’s predecessor. A UN peacekeeping force had been authorized in
March 1993, described by the United States’ UN ambassador, as “an unprecedented enterprise aimed
at nothing less than the restoration of an entire country.” The UN force had a US military contribution,
but this was restricted to a small special operations force which didn’t coordinate with the rest of the
UN force. When the Americans got slaughtered in a bloody ambush (depicted unforgettably in the film
“Black Hawk Down”), Washington bailed out, and the UN peace force quickly collapsed.

The Somalia mess made the UN so nervous about intervention that it ignored an appeal a few months
later from its own representative in Rwanda that a genocidal massacre was about to begin there. Three
months later, 800,000 Rwandans were dead.

The third debacle was Bosnia. In April 1993, the UN Security Council demanded that the town of
Srebrenica, filled with 60,000 Muslim refugees and encircled by Bosnian Serb forces, become a “safe
area . . . free from armed attacks.” The refugees waited more than two years for the UN to deliver. In
July 1995, Gen. Ratko Mladic committed his infamous massacre. A month later, UNPROFOR* finally
intervened.

When Annan became secretary general, the UN tried to bolster its peacekeeping efforts. It did better
in East Timor, Kosovo and Libya in putting some teeth in the concept of a “responsibility to protect.” But
the abiding story has been the UN’s limitations.

*These are agencies of the UN responsible for carrying out specialist work

© UCLES 2015 8987/11/RB/M/J/15

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© UCLES 2015 8987/11/RB/M/J/15